Composer Alex Stephenson (b. 1990) has recently collaborated with artists including the New Fromm Players, the Flux Quartet, Duo Axis, HOCKET, and the La Jolla Symphony. He has received significant commissions from the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, the Breckenridge Music Festival, and the Royaumont Voix Nouvelles Festival, and his music has also been featured at the Tanglewood Music Center, the ISCM World New Music Days, the Composers Conference, and the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, among others. His work has been praised as “masterfully orchestrated” and exhibiting “sonic beauty” (San Diego Union-Tribune).

His string quartet Bloom—which was selected to represent the United States at the 2021 ISCM World New Music Days and was a prizewinner in competitions through the League of Composers, Hausmann Quartet, and Charles Ives Music Festival—places vigorous, passionate bursts of energy into dialogue with sonorous, gently pulsating harmonies. His alternately playful and meditative Chamber Concerto, exploring new methods of combining microtonal synthesizers and electronics with an acoustic ensemble, was premiered by colleagues at UC San Diego under the baton of Steven Schick. Most recently, the San Diego Union-Tribune described Alex’s orchestral work An Elemental Music—commissioned and premiered by the La Jolla Symphony under conductor Michael Gerdes—as a “wonderful new work” that “could be easily programmed by any American orchestra.”

A committed educator, Alex currently serves as Instructional Assistant Professor of Music Theory & Composition at Illinois State University, where he teaches courses in theory and analysis, composition, orchestration, and electroacoustic music. Previously, as an instructor of record at UC San Diego, he received the university-wide Barbara and Paul Saltman Excellent Teaching Award.

Alex’s recent music analysis article, on harmony and politics in contemporary music, appears in Music Theory Online.

Alex holds a Ph.D. in composition (2023) from the University of California San Diego. He was a US-UK Fulbright Postgraduate Scholar (2014-15), studying at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London, and earned a master’s degree (2017) from the Eastman School of Music and a bachelor’s degree (2012) from the University of Chicago.